Dr Matthew Purver, BA MPhil PhD

Reader in Computational Linguistics

Teaching

Interactive System Design (Postgraduate/Undergraduate)

The main areas of study are (i) interaction and design (ii) modelling of interaction (iii) the design process (iv) design principles and (v) usability evaluation. Various types of interfaces will be considered including those encountered on the web and mobile computing devices. A historical perspective is encouraged in order to provide a means of understanding current and projected developments in the discipline and profession of interactive computer system design. The module will include seminars and group laboratory classes in which analysis, design and evaluation methods will be used in practical contexts. Students will be expected to participate fully in the seminars by presenting and discussing their own designs and evaluations. Students will be required to construct prototype interfaces using techniques of their own choice (e.g. Java, Director).

Neural Networks and NLP (Postgraduate)

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has become one of the most important technologies in Artificial Intelligence. Automatic methods for processing natural language now find application in almost every aspect of our communication in person or online, in particular through social media. The increased use of Neural Networks has played an important role in the most recent progress of NLP, as NN techniques have delivered improved performance in applications ranging from language modelling (next word prediction) to speech to machine translation to sentiment analysis. The proposed module provides a thorough introduction to this cutting-edge approach to developing NLP systems.